Dystopian Fiction

“I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it” - Ray Bradbury

Two genres of speculative fiction that you probably read in school at some level are utopian fiction and dystopian fiction. Both explore social and political structures.

The word "utopia" was first used in direct context by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 work Utopia. The word resembles both the Greek words "no place", "outopos", and "good place", "eutopos". His book presents a vision of an ideal society. Plato's The Republic also presents an ideal society and its political system.

Dystopian fiction is "the opposite" - a world that is flawed to the extreme. Though it may resemble in some ways our present world or society, the projection of the future is negative.

Utopias and dystopias are often found in science fiction and other speculative fiction genres. Dystopian worlds often show mass poverty, public mistrust, police states, totalitarian rule, oppression and technology that is advanced and abused.

I used to teach “The Fun They Had,” an Isaac Asimov story from 1951. This was written at a time when computers were new and home computers were non-existent, even in predictions. Home schooling was not a common thing. Online learning wasn't even a term, as online had no meaning. Even television was in its early days. But all that is what the story combines. It is about children who are educated completely at home in front of a screen.

The story's conflict occurs when the computers break down one day. No lessons. During this down time, they are told about the way kids had once gone to schools. They were in rooms with lots of other kids their age. They had a human teacher. There was a playground. They left home every school day.

When I taught this story to middle school children, the irony wasn't always obvious to my students when the kids in the story think about those kids of the past (our present) and "the fun they had" back then.

Asimov's prediction/warning hasn't come completely true. We still have schools for the vast majority of kids, but they certainly spend a lot of time in front of screens in school and at home doing schoolwork.

Samuel Butler's Erewhon (an anagram of "nowhere') is an interesting example. Erewhon isn't a utopia but it is not a dystopia. It is satirical utopia, like Gulliver's Travels (1726). Both books satirize the British Empire of their time.

         

Two popular dystopias that you may have read in school are George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell gives us Oceania, a country at perpetual war, with a population controlled through propaganda. Even people who haven't read the novel (or seen a movie version) have likely heard of the novel's Big Brother.

Aldous Huxley's novel world apparently started as a parody of utopian fiction. He created a "perfect" world of 2540 that he based on what he saw beginning in the industrial and social changes of 1931. In this utopia,the population is divided into five castes and accepts it because they are happily drugged and have been programmed since their birth in test tubes. No problems with old people - the World State kills everyone 60 years old or older.

         

Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange, became much more known when Stanley Kubrick made it into a film. It was (and probably still is) a film that shocks. I had a college professor who cancelled a class because she had just seen the film and was so upset by the treatment of women and violence that she said she could not each. The story is set in a future England where there is a extreme youth violence. The society's method of trying to rehabilitate those criminal youth is equally violent.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale describes a future United States governed by a totalitarian theocracy, where women have no rights. The TV series adaptation has made this tale more real, as Kubrick's film did earlier.

Young adult dystopian fiction has become a big business in print and on screens. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, Divergent, Insurgent by Veronica Roth, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, and Delirium by Lauren Oliver.

Like Asimov, when Ray Bradbury wrote his short story, “The Veldt,” televisions were just coming into homes. But he thought they were already changing a lot of things, including parenting. Television did become a babysitter, and sometimes it was a teacher.

But in “The Veldt,” Bradbury describes a family “nursery” that is what we would call  a very sophisticated Virtual Reality that is highly interactive. Not only does it babysit the kids, it raises them and becomes more and more seductive. Too seductive, according to the parents, who decide it needs to be shut down. The children don't like that one bit, and with the help of the African veldt they take revenge on their parents.

Bradbury was warning about what might happen if parental guidance was lost. I can easily imagine the stories he would be writing today about the state of TV and video games. What might he say about video games that are actually dystopias, such as the Fallout series, BioShock, and the later games of the Half-Life series.

Dystopian fiction is the worst visions of the future. That would appear in apocalyptic literature. "Apocalypse" is a Greek word that does not mean the end of the world. It means "revelation", an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known. As you might suspect, the earliest apocalyptic writing comes from the literature of Judaism and Christianity. It encompasses writing that begins in the centuries following the Babylonian exile through the close of the Middle Ages. But those are tales for another day.